=West Indian Hurricanes.= A few of the most severe storms that touch any portion of our continent originate in the West Indies and travel in a northwesterly direction until they touch our Gulf or South Atlantic coast, when, passing from the influence of the northeast trade winds which carried them westward, they recurve and pass along our eastern coast, usually with their centers offshore and following the Gulf Stream. These violent atmospheric convulsions are usually detected in the process of formation through the effectiveness of the storm-warning service established by the writer during the Spanish-American War, under the direction of the President, for the purpose of giving warning to our fleet before the coming of a hurricane. The President realized the great part played by storms in many of the naval battles of the past, and it may be surmised that he was more afraid of a West Indian hurricane than he was of the Spanish Navy. But Cervera was beaten and the blockade was raised before the hurricanes of 1898 began. =Galveston Hurricane.= The new Weather Service, with a cordon of stations down the Windward Islands and along the north coast of South America, surrounding our fleet, and inaugurated as a war measure, so demonstrated its value in locating and giving warning of the coming of a hurricane soon after the end of the war that Congress continued it as a permanent instrument of peace; and when the destructive Galveston Hurricane occurred in 1900 it detected the storm at its inception and so fully advised shipping of the storm’s movements that not a vessel was lost as the storm roared and gyrated across the Gulf of Mexico and crashed upon the Texas coast, destroying a large part of the city and drowning six thousand people. The hurricane is simply a rapidly gyrating cyclone; it usually is only one to three hundred miles in diameter. The storm that destroyed Galveston moved across the Caribbean Sea at the rate of only about eight to ten miles an hour. It increased its rate as it moved northward, crossing the Gulf at about fifteen miles per hour. The speed of translation was so slow and the velocity of gyration so rapid that immense swells were propagated outward from the center of the storm; they reached the Texas coast some sixteen hours before the storm itself reached Galveston. As it moved northward to Iowa its velocity of translation increased and its rate of gyration decreased, so that it crossed the Lakes with both movements at about sixty miles per hour. At Galveston the anemometer blew to pieces after recording one hundred and thirty miles per hour.